


A Sentimental Education

by Tyellas



Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Literary References & Allusions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 23:55:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15960284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: Wherever he goes, Dmitri carries ten books with him. Though, at times, they carry him.





	A Sentimental Education

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dangerousjade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dangerousjade/gifts).



> For the Shape of Water fic exchange. A fill for dangerousjade's prompt: "Dimitri’s biography mentions that he has 10 different books that he always carries around with him- what are those 10 books and how did they come into his possession? There are only two that are explicitly mentioned, A Sentimental Education and A Catcher in the Rye, but the rest are totally up to you!"

He had left Russia for America with five of them. He had added one or two every few years. They were friends, though they were not human. They were weapons, though they had no edges, no bullets. They were the ten books that helped keep Dmitri Antonovich Moskenov alive, inside the shell of his identity as a spy, Dr. Robert Hoffstetler.

Ten books were not such a load to carry. In fact, at times, they carried him: when he needed it the most.

In the laboratory at Occam, with the creature.

Dmitri had been amazed from the moment he had beheld the creature in Galveston. In this Baltimore lab, seeing its reactions, he was convinced. This was an intelligent being, separate from humanity. He was prepared for this parallel evolution, thanks to Teilhard de Chardin’s _The Phenomenon of Man._

De Chardin, both a priest and a paleontologist, was as contradictory a thinker as Dimitri. In that book de Chardin’s hypothesis was that intelligence and evolution were compatible with higher forces. Looking into the Devonian creature’s golden eyes, Dmitri could almost feel de Chardin’s _cosmogenesis._ The stage beyond mere intelligence: a mind linked to the world itself. De Chardin saw it as a connection to God. With this different intelligence before Dmitri, what else might it be? He left the laboratory with the utmost reluctance, to read and write and pace long after he should have slept.

In his bare-bones Maryland apartment, alone.

This solitude away from work was normal, for him. Perhaps, he thought wryly, he’d be thinner without it. Or he might be plumper yet, with someone pleasant cooking for him, someone to cook for. For his mealtime company, there was the respite of classical music, and a third book. M.F. K. Fisher and her writing about food and life, _The Gastronomical Me._

The photograph on the book’s back cover showed a young woman of astronomical beauty. But in her writing, she was sharp-eyed, awkward, yearning, sympathetic, sad. Hungry, above all, for the good things of life, food and love barely distinguished. Dmitri admired her sensuous thoroughness and all she left unsaid. He, too, had a self arrayed of sliding panels, revealing what he chose. What, in this world, was more honest than memory, love, a slice of butter cake? Very little.

And Fisher's story about her rapture over a five-cent candy bar made him feel better about his own addiction to Twinkies.

In the laboratory again.

Or, rather, poised in its doorway. Watching the creature with somebody else. The speechless cleaning lady, Elisa, had exceeded Dmitri in experimental kindness. She had brought music to the creature, a record player. She was dancing to entertain it. No – Elisa was dancing with it. For it responded to her, swayed with her, slid up to its glass to drink the sight of her in.

Dmitri compared this direct fascination to his own experiences of love. Flaubert had summed it up well in _A Sentimental Education_. The novel’s protagonist, Frédéric, might have been himself. Frédéric’s hesitation, his yearning for an older woman who could never partner with him, his self-centered mistakes. All described with the most delicate cynicism. Dmitri had adopted that as his own shield against matters of the heart.

If Flaubert had seen what Dmitri now saw – something beyond words - perhaps he might have begun to believe in connection.  Like Dmitri was starting to.

In the kitchen of a Russian restaurant.

For once, more of the panels of Dmitri’s hidden self were revealed. He spoke with fellow Russians, fellow agents. He was fighting against the distractions of food to win Mikhail’s attention, defending the Devonian’s life. As Dmitri tried to catch Mikhail’s eye, he found, despite his usual hungers, the food around him meant nothing. Instead, he throbbed with the same urgency he’d felt the first time he’d read Jean-Paul Fabre’s _The Passionate Observer_.

Fabre had opened the wonders of the natural world to Dmitri. Shown him there was more to science and knowledge than simply the knowing: there was wonder and reverence, too. Those could move a man as much as cold measurements. He had to do the same for Mikhail. Transmit the urgency to him. If a mere insect was a marvel, how much more so this unique creature from the dawn of life.

But Dmitri was no wordsmith. No true artist. He felt himself failing, and despaired.

In the laboratory a third time, heart throbbing. Handing the gifted janitor, Elisa, the creature’s keys.

Dmitri had not felt this young and foolish in years. This pure. Feeling the keys slip from his hand to Elisa’s, the books of his boyhood came back to him. His favorites of Alexandre Dumas’ romances – _The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Vicomte of Bragelonne._

How he had longed for such adventure, such passion, as leapt from Dumas’ pages. Most of all, for such true friends. Instead, he had felt like the Man in the Iron Mask of the last volume. Isolated, his true identity denied. But through Elisa’s courage, the two of them could release this prisoner, at least, from his irons. As Dumas said, _Life is a storm, my young friend...What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes._

The chaotic jumble of the next half hour showed him where those true friends were. He found himself a little bit in fellowship, a little bit of a hero. Fully in the heart of the storm.

In Strickland’s office, several days later.

Dmitri had been startled, the other day, to find Strickland reading: _The Power of Positive Thinking._ It looked like Strickland was struggling to find such thoughts now. The loss of the creature had Strickland gray-faced and weary, haunted by the taint of gangrene. It was quite the turnaround from when Dmitri had begged this man, too, to spare the creature’s life. Perhaps Strickland ought to have read one of Dmitri’s favorites, Sun Tzu’s _The Art of War,_ himself.

Strickland was open with his antagonism, like an infantry squad showing off its strength. He trembled with barely suppressed id, with violence and hatred. But to Sun Tzu, war was deception. Intelligence was all. And fighting was like water, with victory to be found in the lowest places. Dmitri allowed himself the luxury of a little goading. “You said you had a lead?”

Strickland replied, “I do.” But he said no more.

The silence of that stayed with Dmitri as he prepared to leave Occam, and America, for good. Its restraint a hint that Strickland might have some true war inside him.

In the heart of the night.

In the pouring rain.

In the sand quarry.

In the welter of his own blood.

Dmitri’s intuition had been right about Strickland. The man had hunted him down. He was grasping at where Strickland had shot him, feeling his life ebbing away from his face, his chest. Jolting from an electric shock. Barely hearing Strickland’s interrogation. The American had to shout to get the merest hint from Dmitri.

After that, in defiance, Dmitri added a cantrip from one of his life’s favorites: Anna Akhmatova’s _From Six Books_. Simply owning it was illegal, for her poetry was thought seditious in their Russian homeland. This book should have been destroyed. He had saved it by bringing it to America, though he had destroyed himself. He wove it all together with her words:

_I’m not one of those who left their land_

_To the mercy of the enemy._

_I was deaf to their gross flattery._

_I won’t grant them my songs…_

At any rate, Dmitri tried to. The shot through his cheek had him gargling his own blood. Dmitri’s reward for that, understood or no, was more agony, the cattle prod again. This was the end, it had to be, please heaven let this end, let him be pulped and gone like Akhmatova’s poetry -

But dying played tricks on him. His body blinked out. Russia was shocked away for America, a late-come favorite, J.D. Salinger’s _The Catcher in the Rye_. Its image of the young man on the brink of a cliff, trying to save others from a fall – but who would save the young man? Another of Dmitri’s friends and selves found in books? No-one, for he himself was fading, falling. Dying nobly for a cause while, as Salinger had noted, admitting he really wanted to live humbly for it.

Dmitri's draining thoughts spiralled him to where this had all began. Teilhard de Chardin. The paradox of science and God. And a creature’s golden eye.


End file.
